Tattle Tales

HOW SWEDE IT IS: No I’m not paraphrasing the introductory words on television of the immortal Jackie Gleason. I’m referring to the revival of Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s "Dance of Death," which I saw in tandem with wife Beverly Anderson (the daughter of Swedish immigrant parents) at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theater. The time of the play is 1900, and the setting (so the program states) is the home of an army captain and his wife, in a fortress on an island off the coast of Sweden. Only Swedish cupcakes and tea at intermission could have made the evening any more Scandanavian for me.

Playing the misanthropic captain and his wife (a former aspiring actress) are Sir Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, whose domicile is the island’s prison, now figuratively their prison. Into their solitude comes a visitor, Kurt (David Strathairn). McKellan greets the visitor as Iago would receive Othello, which does consummately well. No surprise, as they still talk of the subtlety of Sir Ian’s Iago at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The combatant wife is equally well played by Mirren. Without visible effort, she manages to be both unappealing and seductive.

As the play’s odd man out, Strathairn carves his own solid niche in the proscenium.

In the words of former New York Times drama critic, Clive Barnes, now the Post’s aisle pundit, whose opinion I value most, this is a ‘Dance of Death’ "that is continually fascinating...and a version of Strindberg very much relevant to our time."

TOP GROSSER last weekend at the College Point Multiplex in Whitestone was the new Robert Redford-Brad Pitt flick, "Spy Game," and with good reason. The thriller, in which retiring CIA agent Redford outwits his superiors to free his protege (Pitt), a prisoner in China, drew glittering notices. Newsday’s David Ansen called it "Gripping, Entertaining!", while Joel Siegel of "Good Morning, America" enthused that he saw it twice because "It’s that good!" Expertly directed by Tony Scott, this is an expensive-looking production that evokes memories of the Alfred Hitchcock thrillers of yesteryear.